Taking on Theodore Roosevelt

by Harry Lembeck

  At the 1903 meeting of the National Afro-American Council in Louisville, Trotter led the chorus of complaints against Washington. The Council had been formed as an umbrella for civil rights organizations, and its politics embraced them all. One of the council's founders was T. Thomas Fortune, and he helped shade its positions to accommodate Washington. At its first meeting in Rochester, New York, in 1898 the speakers had included Ida B. Wells Barnett, journalist and early civil rights leader; Frederick Douglass, former slave, abolitionist, writer, and black leader; Professor Kelly Miller of Howard University; Mary Church Terrell; and Booker T. Washington (to discuss industrial education).17 As these names and Du Bois's presence suggest, there was a range of black leadership, but it tilted to the Bookerites.18 They controlled the meeting that year in Louisville and outfoxed Trotter's plan to have it criticize Theodore Roosevelt and separate itself from him when he maneuvered the council into passing a resolution endorsing Roosevelt. Trotter's anger swelled.

  Later that month, Washington came to Boston to speak at its African Methodist Episcopal Church. Trotter had taunted him in the past as a coward who was afraid to show up in Boston because of its nest of radicals. Washington could not ignore this dare. Preliminary speakers T. Thomas Fortune and William H. Lewis, both members in good standing of the Tuskegee Machine, were heckled and booed whenever they mentioned Washington's name.19 By the time his turn came to speak, the mood in the church was ugly. He got as far as his beginning words when pandemonium erupted. “We don't want to hear you, Booker T. Washington. We don't like you,” the Boston Radicals shouted at him. Police were called in to calm things down, but their success was only temporary. Trotter, to embarrass Washington and to show him to be inconsequential, stood on a chair and in a high, shrill voice shouted damning questions he never intended Washington to answer. He called Washington's leadership a calamity. Things got completely out of hand. Men were yelling and hissing at Washington, stink bombs were set off, and one man was slashed with a razor and had to be taken to the hospital. Trotter used his umbrella as a weapon, and his sister Maude did same with a hat pin. Back in came the police, this time with a vengeance. Trotter and his sister were arrested, and he would stay in jail for a month.20 (What the Tuskegee Machine could do was made even clearer to Trotter after the Boston Riot. It made sure he stayed in jail for the full sentence.)

  It was Trotter's public confrontation with Washington in Boston that first exposed whites and many blacks to black factionalism. Du Bois himself in his autobiography credits Trotter's jailing after the Boston Riot as the reason he sent out “a call to a few selected persons” to organize the first Niagara Movement conference in July 1905.21 Du Bois knew the Tuskegee Machine's strength was real and to oppose it he had to create a counterbalancing and more confrontational organization. The Niagara Movement was to be it. With a program of confrontation, Du Bois and his supporters thought they had the means to tear away the veil of trust between Negroes and Booker T. Washington, and by extension, to the Republican Party and President Theodore Roosevelt.22

  A year later, Brownsville would help them.23

  ON FRIDAY, AUGUST 15, 1906, the second day after the Brownsville shooting that Du Bois no doubt was aware of by then, he addressed the second annual meeting of the Niagara Movement at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and said, “We will not be satisfied to take one jot or tittle less than our full manhood rights. We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil, and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America.”24 He was by then an agitator.25 The following March in the Voice of the Negro magazine, referring to himself he wrote, “Here then comes the agitator. He is the herald—he is the prophet—he is the man who says to the world: There are evils which you do not know but which I know and you must listen to them.”26

  Only three years earlier he had penned “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” and signaled if not the end of Washington's near monarchy, then its tarnished crown. The two men knew and took the measure of each other. Washington recognized the genius in Du Bois but never confused merit with reality.27 The reality for Du Bois was that Washington was too much the icon of black leadership to chuck aside. But his angry rhetoric and growing impatience with the glacial pace of change could, with his allies, make life difficult for Washington and chip at his leadership pedestal.28 Brownsville and Washington's defense of Roosevelt would help Du Bois tip it over and ultimately change the direction of the civil rights movement.

  TO A POINT, BOTH Washington and Du Bois saw Brownsville the same way. Both believed the shooters were soldiers, and they agreed those men and those others who helped them, either directly or by keeping quiet, deserved severe punishment. But because of the factionalism in the Negro movement, they had opposite motivations: Washington to prove Roosevelt was right; Du Bois to prove Roosevelt wrong. Washington and Du Bois assembled their alliances and sharpened their knives, and each prepared his plans to thwart the other. For each of them and the nation, the consequences were ordained.

  BEFORE LEAVING DU BOIS'S turn to confrontation with Washington and seeing it only as either the result of his disappointment with the bare (if any) gains realized from accommodation or his tendency to think radically when Washington sized things up realistically, it is well to consider a personal story.

  His son, Burghardt, died in Atlanta when he was eighteen months old. The limitless love a father has for a son, sharing with him the excitement and glee of seeing the world for the first time through his son's eyes (and rediscovering it for himself), and feeling pride as he sees the boy grow, was now gone from Du Bois's life forever. The boy died of diphtheria when his father, frantic with fear and dread, was unable to find a nearby white doctor who would treat him and ran out of time when he sought one of the black doctors who lived too far away in the neighborhood Atlantans today call “Sweet Auburn.” He would write of its devastation as a chapter in The Souls of Black Folk, and in his grief the father would try make his son's “life and death monumentally symbolic” for himself and the race.29 He begins the chapter titled “Of the Passing of the First Born” with a stanza from the poem “Itylus” by Algernon Charles Swinburne:

  O sister, sister, thy first-begotten

  The hands that cling and the feet that follow,

  The voice of the child's blood crying yet,

  Who hath remembered me? who hath forgotten?

  Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow,

  But the world shall end when I forget.30

  For Du Bois, there were many things he could not forget. His son, Burghardt. And injustice.

  WHEN MINGO SANDERS MET Mary Church Terrell in Washington, he had come to the nation's capital on a mission. He wanted to get back into the army. He wanted justice.

  “This has been an extraordinary week. [I] think we have done some good work not for the soldiers alone, not for the Republic, for Justice.”

  John Milholland,

  diary entry for December 6, 1906

  THE WEEK BEGAN PRECISELY at noon on Monday, December 3, when the US Senate was called into session by its presiding officer, Vice President Charles W. Fairbanks. It was customary on the first day of a new session to recess quickly after some brief and perfunctory business. Normally it would receive President Roosevelt's nominees for federal positions, one of whom today was, as he promised Jewish New Yorkers, Oscar Straus as secretary of commerce and labor and the first Jewish member of the cabinet. The secretary of the navy (then a cabinet department) Charles J. Bonaparte was posted to the Justice Department to replace as attorney-general (as it was then hyphenated) William Moody; Moody would succeed Justice Henry Brown on the Supreme Court (Secretary of War Taft was offered the seat first but turned it down because he was running for president). James R. Garfield (whose father James A. Garfield was handed the 1888 Republican presidential nomination when Joseph Foraker said no to it in his hotel room in Chicago) was nominated to replace Ethan Allen Hitchco
ck as secretary of the interior. Hitchcock's stern and often-unyielding leadership there antagonized too many important Republicans, especially Senator Francis E. Warren of Wyoming, chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee. Getting Hitchcock out of his hair was not the only good news Senator Warren received that day; Roosevelt asked the Senate to approve the promotion of his son-in-law, army Captain John J. Pershing, to brigadier general, skipping three ranks. For his old position as civil-service commissioner, Roosevelt selected John A. McIlhenny, a hunting buddy and, most important for Roosevelt, a former Rough Rider. (More important possibly for later generations, McIlhenny's family made Tabasco brand Original Red Sauce a part of the American diet.) Ernest A. Garlington, who had recommended discharging the soldiers for what he saw as their conspiracy of silence, was to be formally approved as the army's inspector-general and promoted to brigadier general.1

  These presidential appointments, however, had to wait when, senators barely back in their seats after Reverend Edward Everett Hale's invocation, Pennsylvania senator Boies E. Penrose came to his feet. Addressing Vice President Fairbanks in his role as president of the Senate, he called out, “Mr. President. I submit a resolution asking for certain information, and if that is not out of order I would ask for its present consideration.”2

  AS PART OF ITS constitutional responsibility to pass legislation, Congress has the right to investigate why new laws may be needed, existing laws changed or repealed, and just about anything and anyone else it has an interest in. This goes double for the Senate, which often serves as a check on executive authority. A treaty agreed to by the administration has no effect unless the Senate ratifies it. A selection for the US Supreme Court must be blessed by it. As the nine-page-long list of appointments presented to the Senate on December 3 showed, other appointments for positions as high as federal judges and not quite as high (though probably harder working) as surgeons in the Public Health Service had to be approved by this most august body, the US Senate. The Senate considers itself the “upper house” of Congress, which for the Senate means the only important house. The biographer and historian Robert Caro has written that to make the Senate stand for all time, our Founding Fathers made it very strong.3 They also made even the president occasionally dependent on it and fearful of what it could do.

  The Senate is where Roosevelt expected any potentially worrisome attack on Brownsville to come from. He knew all about Senator Foraker's preparation.4 With his thoroughness and eloquence, Foraker could capture the Senate's attention and persuade it to take the one step Roosevelt most feared—a formal Senate investigation of Brownsville. There was no telling where it might lead, what dragon's teeth it might sow, what consequences Roosevelt's enemies might reap.

  His first defense would be to argue his order discharging the soldiers was issued as commander in chief, and this made it practically untouchable, so why waste time questioning it? If this failed, and he expected it might, he could try to limit the scope of the Senate's inquiry with a mandate so limited and a reach so short, the investigation would, as Theodore Roosevelt the boxer might say, be unable to lay a glove on him. He therefore had to preempt Foraker by asking for a resolution in a way better suited to defending himself. He would have his own resolution, one more to his liking, introduced by a cooperating senator, and try to get it approved in place of Foraker's.

  THE PREVIOUS WEDNESDAY, THE day before Thanksgiving, Roosevelt met at the White House with Pennsylvania's “Boss” Penrose, one of the most colorful “scoundrels of American politics,” or less generously, “among the most unscrupulous senators.”5 He was from Philadelphia, where, so said Tammany Hall's George Washington Plunkett from New York, politicians plundered the public with great daring. “The Philadelphians ain't satisfied with robbing the bank of all its gold and paper money. They stay and pick up the nickels and pennies. Why, I remember…a Republican superintendent of the Philadelphia almshouse stole the zinc roof off the buildin’ and sold it for junk. That was carrying things to excess.”6

  Excess was how Penrose defined himself. Even physically. Weighing 350 pounds and standing six feet, four inches, he had extra-size furniture made for home and office. When Pennsylvania's other senator, the pint-sized Philander Chase Knox, came to Penrose's office he had to dangle his legs over the edge of the chair, to Penrose's great enjoyment.7 Penrose gained his gargantuan girth by indulging his enormous appetite. A foolish bettor whose appetite was then legendary wagered Penrose that he could not eat more oysters and drink more bourbon. Penrose started off with three dozen oysters and a bottle of Old Crow bourbon and did not stop eating and drinking until the other man had to be hospitalized.8 For breakfast he could eat a dozen eggs and a seven-pound steak as he drank a quart of coffee. He got so overweight he could not fit into seats in movie houses, so he bought his own $3,000 projector for his Washington apartment. The first time he turned it on, it blew out the building's electrical system. He had the power company dig up the street, lay a special cable, and extend it up the building's side and into his apartment. He paid the cost himself.9

  His father, Dr. Richard Alexander Fullerton Penrose, was a prominent physician and a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. His brother Charles also was a physician, and his brother Spencer a businessman, entrepreneur, and philanthropist in Colorado Springs (he financed development of the Broadmoor Hotel). A very bright man, Boies graduated from Harvard second in his class in 1881. (Theodore Roosevelt, overlapping three years with him, graduated a year earlier and was twenty-first in his class.10) He remained in Cambridge to get his law degree. “Privately, he surrounded himself with books on history, biography, economics, philosophy, and psychology. He was fond of reading the classics in the original Latin. Like Roosevelt, he enjoyed the outdoors; unlike Roosevelt, they were only for looking at while being motored in his car, where he might talk about the birds and trees he saw. He prided himself on knowing all the bird species of Pennsylvania.”11 Theodore Roosevelt admitted, “Penrose was better informed about the flora and fauna of this part of the United States than any other man in public life,” and then added, “except me.”12 Penrose would get out of the car to hunt, an activity he loved, but none of that “small” game, such as moose, deer, or caribou (such a hunter, he said, “would shoot a cow and call it sport”); for him the only worthwhile quarry was a grizzly bear. On one hunt in the Wyoming Tetons with his brother Charles, they stumbled onto a grizzly and her two cubs. When Charles killed one cub, the enraged mother charged him; he managed to get a shot into her, but in her death throes, she smashed one of his arms, broke some of his ribs, and almost severed a leg. Boies, ignoring the guide's insistence he could not carry Charles out of the woods to safety, did just that through forests until then penetrated only by Indians, and in three days he delivered his bandaged brother to the Mayo Clinic.

  PENROSE CLAIMED HE HELPED make Roosevelt vice president in 1900.13 He told despairing New York boss Senator Tom Platt, at the end of his rope trying to get Roosevelt out of New York and out of his hair, “I went to college with Theodore. I know Theodore very well. If you can get enough people for him hollering to take the job—common people, mind you, not nice people—he'll insist on being Vice-President. Just tell Theodore that the people need him in Washington and then start people out West writing to him begging him to take it. I've known Theodore a long time.”14 Platt took this advice, and that helped persuade Roosevelt to accept the nomination.

  As Penrose said, he and Theodore knew each other a long time. Neither man could stand the other, but political to their cores, they could deal with each other when they had to. On November 5, the day before voters went to the polls, they had met at the White House to discuss the campaign. To the Washington Herald, Penrose said the meeting was about “several departmental matters,”15 but to the New York Tribune, he was more forthcoming. “The President is in hearty sympathy with us [in Pennsylvania], and I see no reason to fear the result.”16 But he must have been biting his polished fingernails dow
n to the first knuckle over the election. A fusion of Democrats and independent Republicans running against his slate of machine candidates throughout the state threatened to end his rule there. Roosevelt was worried, but not about the same thing. He needed a solid Republican delegation in the new Congress to help push his legislative program. Penrose had little interest in either Roosevelt's legacy or the Republicans in Washington. Like any political boss, he had to protect his turf—and patronage—back home. That was where his power was. Any loosening of his grip in Pennsylvania could foreshadow catastrophe for him. Happy election results in the Keystone State therefore were in both men's interests.

  Roosevelt had sent administration officials to Pennsylvania to campaign. Senator Philander Knox, perhaps with Penrose's massive furniture in mind, wasn't sure he wanted to go, but Roosevelt showed him the true light. On September 20, he had Senator and Mrs. Knox as overnight guests at Sagamore Hill, where he brought up the subject.17 In a handwritten report to Penrose he wrote, “I had a most interesting talk with Knox. Make him speak in the campaign.”18 On September 22, he followed up in a letter to Knox, “It is of the utmost consequence that you should speak in the present campaign…. We have the right to expect [your] leadership.”19 Knox did his duty in his hometown of Pittsburgh and throughout the state, and it looks like he did it well. After the meeting with Penrose on November 5, Roosevelt wrote Knox, “Accept a belated word of congratulation on your speech. I was mightily pleased with it.”20

  Roosevelt had led from the front and in Harrisburg had spoken to more than one hundred thousand people on a cold, drizzly day at the opening of the new Pennsylvania State Capitol.21 Supposedly a nonpartisan speech, it was clear the politician in chief was pumping for Republicans in the campaign. It all worked. The Penrose Machine triumphed. The fusion candidate for governor lost to Penrose's man by more than one hundred thousand votes. Three of the winners in the races to replace the four vacancies in the congressional delegation were Republican.22 Both Roosevelt and Penrose were happy. Roosevelt more so; he now had Penrose's IOU in his pocket. On November 28, Roosevelt had him come back to the White House to talk about Brownsville, Senator Foraker, and repaying his debt. There is no record of what the two politicians said to each other, but Roosevelt, as more than a conversation icebreaker, no doubt recalled the recent election.